| Publication: The Gazette; |
| Date: Jan 2, 2005; |
| Section: Life; |
| Page Number: 55 |
Miner Changes
Women find role in modern gold mining
By DAVE PHILIPPS THE GAZETTE
CRIPPLE CREEK - Women were considered bad luck in the mines around here a century ago. They couldn’t work in them. They couldn’t even visit.
When Mollie Kathleen Gortner toured the mine she owned on the hill above town in the 1890s, legend says her employees came to the surface and waited until she left to resume work.
Times have changed.
The search for precious metals has survived in the gold district on the west side of Pikes Peak, but suspicion of women has been tossed on the slag heap of history — along with almost every old mining practice.
The transformation is obvious in the Cripple Creek and Victor Gold Mining Co.’s 800-foot-deep open-pit mine, where fleets of dump trucks, with tires as tall as train cars, are busy hauling away whole mountains, 300 tons at a time.
Behind the wheel of one of the giant trucks, in a cab 18 steps off the ground, sits Frankie Bates, 52, g r a n d m o t h e r, former professional olive-oil taster and electrolygist, and now a typical face in modern mining.
“It was scary in the beginning, let’s face it, permanent hair removal is not driving a giant truck. But you get used to it,” she said as a shovel the size of a brontosaurus lumbered toward her truck.
Bates, wearing mirrored safety glasses and a neat, green sweater, waited as the shovel’s steel jaws dropped three mouthfuls of ore into her truck. On the fourth dump, the scale in her cab read 291 tons — a full load. With a wave to the man operating the shovel, she shifted into drive and headed for the leach pile.
“These guys I work with are great kids — I call them kids,” she said, chuckling. “They’re grown-up young guys, but they are so nice. They really treat everyone equally. I feel very welcome here.”
Bates is one of 300 employees, including 39 women, who keep Colorado’s only major gold mine running 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Her $2.3 million Euclid Hitachi truck weighs almost 1 million pounds when full and consumes 35 gallons of diesel an hour.
“This thing handles like a Go-Kart,” she said. “I’m better at driving it than my little Hyundai Santa Fe.”
The controls don’t look much different from the dashboard of a school bus, except for the small screen that lets Bates use a camera to reverse, and the satellite radio receiver screwed to the dash. She said SIRIUS Left, a liberal talk station, is best for cutting through the monotony of a 12-hour shift.
“That’s got to be the worst part of this job, the monotony,” she said. “But at the end of the day, you’ve moved a million pounds of ore. You feel like you’ve accomplished something.”
Bates came to Colorado from California seven years ago to be closer to her grown children and settled with her husband in an old, uneven-floored cabin on the east end of Cripple Creek.
Her job, at its most basic, is no different from what the builder of her cabin might have done for work 100 years ago. She transports ore from the mountain to the processing plant where gold is removed. But these days there is no pick, no mule, and no candlelight in cramped caverns. There is just one sprawling pit that has swallowed almost all of the old mining district, devouring countless old shafts and even townsites.
On the sides of the 4,000-acre “hole,” as the miners call it, layers of tunnels where men scratched after gold in the dark 100 years ago are now open to the bright air like doors on an unfinished elevator shaft.
“Uh uh, you would never get me down in one of those shafts,” Bates said, glancing into a tunnel with fallen support timbers just visible in the gloom.
She won’t even go on a guided tourist trip into the Mollie Kathleen Mine.
“It’s cold. It’s damp. Plus, I figure I’ll be in the ground soon enough. I don’t need to go any sooner.”
GOLD RUSH
Cripple Creek got its start in 1890 when a prospector named Bob Womack walked into Old Colorado City with a few chunks of ore worth more than $250 a ton, which he had picked up on the back of Pikes Peak.
The ensuing gold rush turned out to be the richest strike ever in Colorado.
At its height, 100 years ago, 9,000 men rode to more than 150 working mines every day on an electric trolley system.
The district had the third- and fourth-biggest cities in the state, Cripple Creek and Victor, and boasted two opera houses, 73 saloons and five daily newspapers.
Work in the mines was hard, long and dangerous, according to Jan MacKell, a Cripple Creek historian and author.
“These guys were working 10- to 12-hour days with no breaks, no health insurance, no workmen’s comp, no vacation benefits and very few safety regulations. Cave-ins, explosions, machine malfunctions and improper use of equipment could maim a man for life, and accidents weren’t uncommon,” she said recently.
The average miner was paid $3 a day in 1900 — good pay at the time. For most of the workers, those hours were spent in tunnels called stopes that followed veins of ore.
A miner could hand-load about 16 tons of ore per day into metal carts. Then the rock was winched up the shaft and shipped to Colorado Springs or Florence, where mills pulled the gold from the mother rock.
“It was labor intensive and inefficient, and so it was expensive. Mining then was only possible with highgrade ore,” said Ed Hunter, a Victor resident and local history buff.
Back then, he said, a mine could make money only if every ton of rock had at least one ounce of gold.
Today, almost all the high-grade ore is gone, but with mammoth trucks and shovels taking the place of men with picks, mine literature notes that the mine can make a profit if every ton of rock holds 3/100 of an ounce of gold — a piece the size of a swatted mosquito.
BOOM COMES BACK
The first mining boom faded in Cripple Creek around World War I when rising labor costs and falling gold prices made it too expensive to pull the metal out of the ground. Although a few hobby mines persisted, the last real mine closed in 1962.
When the Cripple Creek and Victor Gold Mining Co. started digging in 1995, major gold production returned to the area, but this time it brought techniques and social values that the mine owners of yore would never recognize.
The company’s 10 300-ton trucks can easily move a million pounds of rock a day to a crusher next to the pit. The crusher then chews the ore into 3/4-inch gravel.
The gravel is spread in level piles measured in hundreds of acres, and a lattice of pipes over the piles drips a diluted solution of sodium cyanide over the gravel.
As the cyanide leaches through the rock, it dissolves all the gold it touches “like sugar in coffee,” according to mine spokeswoman Jane Mannon.
The solution seeps to the bottom of the pile, hits a rubber liner and flows through a drain leading to a processing plant where gold is removed from the solution.
Once the cyanide and gold are separated, the metal is melted down and formed into 80-pound “buttons” resembling Shriners’ hats in size and shape.
The mine makes 10 to 20 buttons a week, which are shipped to a refinery in Massachusetts and used for everything from jewelry to cell phone circuitry.
Since 1995, when the mine opened, it has produced more than 2 million ounces of the precious metal. Geologists think another 3.4 million ounces can be recovered. When the gold runs out, around 2012, Bates will have a new job: hauling dirt for reclamation.
A century ago, mines that could no longer afford to operate just shut down, leaving open shafts and piles of waste. Today, state law requires that mines post a bond to pay for cleanup in the event of bankruptcy.
The Cripple Creek and Victor Gold Mining Co. posted a $40 million warranty payable to the state for reclamation. After mining stops, the company plans to spend eight years filling and grading the pit, planting grass and trees, and replacing a few historic mine buildings.
“People probably won’t be able to tell there was ever anything here,” Bates said.
She likes working for a company that she said cleans up after itself. She likes that the mine gives money to local organizations for historic preservation and vet bills for the district’s wild donkeys, among other things.
From the window of her truck, she pointed out historic mine buildings the company moved when it started mining the pit, now surrounded by interpretive trails. Compared with old mine owners, whose civic involvement seemed to consist of threatening to lynch a Victor sheriff who was sympathetic to the unions, the new mine is kinder, and gentler, many locals agree.
One remnant of the past is still very much alive — the mine owners don’t want a union.
In 1904, after a violent strike in the mines killed 13 people, a group organized by the mine owners rounded up every union organizer, put them on an eastbound train, tossed them out on the prairie when they reached the Kansas line and told them never to return. From then on, owners hired only nonunion workers.
Mine owners no longer threaten to lynch anyone or send them off on boxcars, but no worker pays union dues. And Bates said there is little reason to unionize. The job is safe, the benefits are good, and the pay for drivers ranges from $12.75 to $26.60 an hour.
“Don’t even say ‘union’ around here,” said Bates as she drove back into the hole. “They don’t like ’em. They don’t have ’em. And they don’t want ’em.”
CONTACT THE WRITER: 636-0223 or dphilipps@gazette.com
PUT IT IN DRIVE: Frankie Bates works 12-hour shifts driving a 300-ton truck at the Cripple Creek and Victor Gold Mining Co. Bates is a 52-yearold grandmother and former professional olive-oil taster — and a typical face in modern mining.
PHOTOS BY JERILEE BENNETT, THE GAZETTE - MONSTER TRUCK: Frankie Bates, descending from her Euclid Hitachi truck, is one of 300 employees, including 39 women, who keep Colorado’s only major gold mine running 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
PIKES PEAK LIBRARY DISTRICT, SPECIAL COLLECTIONS - OLD TIMES: Cripple Creek miners earned about $3 a day for 10-12 hours of work — good pay in 1900.
NEW METHODS: A century ago, mines that could no longer afford to operate just shut down, leaving open shafts and piles of waste. Today, state law requires that mines post a bond to pay for cleanup in case of bankruptcy.
FAT TIRE: Frankie Bates removes a wedge from the wheel of her truck, which weighs almost 1 million pounds when full and consumes 35 gallons of diesel an hour. “This thing handles like a Go-Kart,” she said.
PHOTOS BY JERILEE BENNETT, THE GAZETTE - HEAVY LOAD: Rock is loaded into a truck at the Cripple Creek & Victor Gold Mining Co. The rock is taken to a crusher, then gold is extracted from the crushed rock.
